Ken Loach's Save the Children: the film that bit the hand that fed it

BFI Southbank is marking the director's 75th birthday with the unveiling of his controversial 1969 documentary, which the children's charity funded but then wanted banned

Save the film ... Ken Loach's 1969 Save the Children film was originally blocked by the charity, but they have now agreed to its screening by the BFI.
Photograph: BFI National Achive BFI National Achive/BFI National Achive

This month, BFI Southbank in London marks Ken Loach's 75th birthday, and his 50 years in the business, with a colossal new retrospective. The centre-piece is perhaps the unveiling of his "lost" 1969 television documentary, partly bankrolled by the Save the Children charity. It is an exhilarating experience. Perhaps Loach scholars will come to see it as an early, brutalist masterpiece, uncompromisingly angry and disdainful.

Never in the history of documentary film-making was the feeding hand bitten so spectacularly, so gloriously. To say that the Save the Children charity come badly out of the film, which they themselves had bankrolled, was the understatement of 1969, or any year. After a ferocious legal row, Save the Children actually demanded Loach's film be banned. Loach and his producer Tony Garnett finally negotiated a compromise: the unfinished film would be stored in the BFI National Archive until such time as the charity gave its permission for it to be screened. This it has now done, 42 years after the event, and it will be shown in its raw state, with no titles or credits, and without a title – although I think "Save the Children" would be good.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when the executives of Save the Children first viewed Ken Loach's film! They would presumably have been given to understand that the first half of the film would be about the charity's holiday home for deprived children in Essex, and the second about its school for homeless boys in Nairobi, Kenya. As far as it goes, that is an accurate description. So far, go good …

Famously, Loach's Cathy Come Home inspired the foundation of the Crisis charity. The high-ups at Save the Children probably thought that they and Loach were pretty much on the same page. They probably suspected that Loach would give a tough account of the social and political forces which created poverty, but then give a reasonably supportive picture of what little a charitable body could do under these circumstances.

How very wrong. Loach utterly derides the work of Save the Children, in both Britain and Africa, as a mere sticking plaster or temporary measure. One voiceover – unidentified in the film's still raw state – remarks: "Until these questions are addressed politically, then these fire-brigade rescue jobs cannot possibly solve it!" But it is not just this. The good faith and attitude of the charity are utterly dismissed. The Save the Children officers in Essex are shown to be grotesquely condescending and snobbish. One drawling woman is heard on the subject of the children's "animal instinct" and "cunning," in playing off the charity workers against each other to get privileges and treats. In Kenya, the homeless boys are put into an English public school system, reading Tom Brown's Schooldays, but forbidden to speak Swahili or wear national dress.

In Africa, as in Britain, Save the Children is dismissed as a salve for the conscience of the prosperous west, pacifying the poor at home and, abroad, part of the dishonest "aid" mentality. Save the Children emerges from this film as the useful idiot of further oppression, an important part of the new technique of enslaving Kenya as an economic client state.

Loach's Save the Children is, magnificently, a world away from "responsible" documentary film-making. There is no cautious balancing view, no lenient acknowledgement of the fact that the poor, chuckle-headed Save the Children types are just doing their best. (However, in political terms, there is a balancing quote, of a sort. One woman is heard dismissing political action of the sort Loach espouses, on the grounds that it will just make the lower classes welfare dependent.)

Inappropriate, I know, but I actually laughed out loud at the sheer, in-your-face provocation of this film. It is black and white, in every sense. My own theory – which I have to admit I have not put to the director himself – was that at some stage Ken Loach must have known that his film was going to be banned, and this liberated him to say whatever the hell he liked.

What is so radical, even slightly surreal about Save the Children is that the Kenya half has little or nothing about the Save the Children charity. Loach just dwells, with superb tactlessness, on the poverty and racism that was still a feature there. He haunts the avenues and cafes and swimming pools of the city, listening to the chatter – a sort of À Propos De Nairobi. One white person is heard to say: "The people here are frightfully interesting, even the people who live here …" – and these people, the woman says, are happier in their picturesque state of poverty.

Save the Children does look very ancient now, and it is perhaps as a social document of a bygone world that the charity has now decided to tolerate it. But what of its charity work now? Does Loach think that it has become more acceptable? And how about the unsaved children of 2011, the rioters and looters with whose perfidy Britain's magistrates are still dealing? What does Ken Loach think about them?

I would love to see Ken Loach make Save the Children 2: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Give Money to Charity.